Takeaways:

Chris’s experience at Colonial life with how they handled the unique situation of getting employees who are not employees engaged and playing an active role in advocacy has a lot to offer to help you with your business.  In the talk, you just heard Chris shared five lessons from what his company has done.  A brief summary of each of those lessons is below.

• Lesson1 – Understanding your brand. Craft messaging and develop the tone of that messaging in line with the brand.  Also, consider which audience speaking to.  In Chris’ case, he had a variety of audiences that needed attention, you might just have one.

• Lesson 2 – Crafting the plan.  That plan needs to include asking questions, sending surveys, listening, confirming and testing.  Out of all of this listening is the biggest thing and then acting on what you hear.  Learn to be a good listener!

• Lesson 3 – Create Content with them in mind, customize it, focus on engagement, name drop and utilize links.

• Lesson 4 – Build the brand of your non-employee.  They need to see you as a partner and you have to train them, get them engaged and share their posts on social to increase their visibility.  In return for helping them build their brand, they will be more engaged with you and support your brand efforts.

• Lesson 5 – Measure is the final lesson Chris shared.  This means you need to evaluate and re-evaluate what is working.  Then reward the non-employee, even just by re-tweeting or sharing their social posts. It’s about recognition, not big prizes.  And remember sometimes you need to restart things now and again in order to get it right.  And of course, remind the non-employees to be engaged but do it from a place that says how can we the organization help you!  That is important.

The great thing is that even though you don’t have the internal employees advocates you can still create highly engaged, effective

Connect with Chris on Twitter @cwinston75 or on LinkedIn.

Watch the video of Chris’s session here.